From the Board

I am the son of an anchorman. I am a First Amendment guy. In a statement after Diana's death, I said the only thing worse than out-of-control photographers with no sense of conscience would be trying to restrict them. You can't restrict freedom of speech or the press, even if it is miserable.
— George Clooney quoted in TIME

Some of you have quite rightly suggested enhancements to the overall services OSI offers the Open Source community. We've decided to do something about it...namely, to hire someone to help our all-volunteer Board of Directors work more effectively to get certain things done.

The job description is posted here, or you can just click the "OSI is Hiring!!" item in the navigation bar on the left of this page.

As developers of Open Source software, at Kitware we are very
excited to see that is more and more common for federal funding
agencies to require or encourage the creation and use of open
source software when they announce funding programs.

We see with concern however that funding agencies don't seem to
have a defined standard on what "Open Source" means, and as a
consequence they and the public not always receive what they are
expecting in return for the investment of public funds.

As SCO's attack against Linux collapses, with Judge Dale Kimball's ruling on the Novell copyrights making it plainer than ever that the lawsuit was fraudulent from the word go, we're now seeing recantations from two of SCO's three major journalistic stooges -- Dan Lyons and Rob Enderle. The third, Maureen O'Gara, has yet to be heard from.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein

Last week I flew to Las Vegas to talk on stage with The Gartner Group's lead open source analyst Mark Driver at their 2007 Open Source Summit. The subject of the discussion was a paper I presented last year in Kyoto at the STS Forum entitled Software Industry vs. Software Society: Who Wins in 2020?". In that paper I cited a reference that the global IT spend is USD $1T (one trillion dollars!), and of that $1T, $180B is pure write-off of failed applications, and that another $206B (my estimate) is also lost due to late, broken, or late-and-broken applications. Such a dismal result has not only plunged the software industry into crisis, but has put industries using IT at risk.

RMS is leading people off on his own path again. He's saying that if people want to keep their freedom they better not follow Torvalds. While it's great that RMS doesn't compromise his principles, the principle that he isn't compromising isn't necessary. RMS constantly tells us that it is the word "Free" which is important. This says to me that he feels that the experience of freedom -- that actual freedom -- is not important. Only the name is important, not the thing.

There's been a lot of debate in the community about how OSI should properly handle Microsoft's planned submission of some of its licenses for OSD certification. That debate has been been going on within OSI, too.
OSI's official position, from the beginning, which I helped formulate and have expressed to any number of reporters and analysts, is that OSI will treat any licenses submitted to Microsoft strictly on their merits, without fear or favor. That remains OSI's position. But...